Monday, April 4, 2011

French Fridays with Dorie Roundup

Lifelong procrastinator that I am, you will usually find me in the kitchen on the last day of the month trying to cram every FFwD recipe in at the last minute. This, my friends, is how I roll. I've had about 35 years to perfect my procrastination skills and I think I've finally got it down to a science.

In the month of March there were four recipes: Savory Cheese and Chive Bread, Beggar's Linguine, Salted Butter Break-Ups, and Scallops with Caramel-Orange Sauce. Early on, I decided not to make the Scallops with Caramel-Orange Sauce. Good scallops are hard to find here in Kentucky and I'm pretty much the only one in the house who enjoys them.

Surprisingly, my favorite recipe of the month was the Beggar's Linguine. Dorie's Beggar's Linguine is a combination of linguine (or in my case spaghetti) tossed with pistachios, almonds, dried figs, moist raisins, Parmesan cheese, brown butter and orange zest. I love pasta and I love fruit and nuts, but I didn't really think I would like them together. I couldn't have been more wrong. This dish was amazing and I'm definitely making it again. The brown butter together with the crunchy toasted nuts and the little sweet bursts of fruit was a real revelation. I've been craving it's unique taste ever since I had it for lunch the other day.

The second runner up was Dorie's Savory Cheese and Chive Bread. A delicious quick bread loaded with not only shredded cheese, but also cubed cheese with lots and lots of chive flavor. This bread was so delicious toasted and smeared with butter. I made two loaves.

Cubes of cheese created little cheesy pockets - yum!

Lastly, here is my sad, very sad, version of Dorie's Salted Butter Break-Ups. The butter break-up is supposed to be a big beautiful golden brown cookie with a gorgeous crosshatch pattern that is broken up and served at the table. Mine was big alright, but it never achieved a golden brown color, the crosshatch marks didn't show up, and there were lots of little holes in the cookie. Baking is one area where I need a lot of work. Clearly. Appearances aside, the cookie itself wasn't a favorite at all. It was buttery and salty, but not very sweet (almost like a cracker). We tried smearing it with Nutella, but at the end of the day, it was only okay. Definitely our least favorite of the three recipes and also something I wouldn't make again.

There are five delicious recipes for the month of April and I want to make them all. Hopefully I won't wait until the last day of April to make all five. That would not be pretty!

Kim, I love your Dorie Roundups :o) Great recipes this time. I've made the bread several months ago when I first received the book and we all loved it as well. The pasta dish sounds extremely intriguing. I don't think I would necessarily pick it straight out of the book, but after reading yours and several other reviews I will have to give this one a try sometime.

Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment! At the moment I am having a huge problem with spam so I've had to add comment moderation and close off comments to anonymous users. I apologize for the trouble and hope to return my comments to normal shortly.